MacBook Air Not letting me Reinstall OS X Disc

Hello,

I have a 2012 model for the Macbook Air that suddenly crashed on me as I was working. It now appears with the question mark folder icon blinking when I open it.

I held down "Option" and it started to do an internet recovery. Afterwards, it gave me an option to Reinstall Mac OS X. When I get to the step of Select the disk where you want to install Mac OS X", it is blank.

What should I do?

I would say Hard Drive died but the 2012 Air is a SSD. Strange its not showing up. When you get to that installer click on the tools menu up top and launch Disk Utility. See if the drive shows up there. If so erase or Partition it.

This does indeed sound like a failed SSD. Very unusual, thus I would strongly suggest getting an Apple tech to have a look at that.

As advised, take it to Apple. If your 2012 MBA is still under warranty Apple will replace the SSD. Even if it's no longer under warranty, I would still take it to Apple since that SSD is not easy to replace as a do it yourself job. Hopefully you have been making backups?

And not unusual for SSD to crash. Have a Kingston, G.Skill Falcon and an OWC Mercury that would not accept firmware update in the bottom of my parts cupboard so they fail like any hard drive.

If I did not make ANY backups, what options do I have with recovering my files?

Ohh dear ohh dear. Backups are essential. Your first chore when all is up and running is purchase an external hard drive and use cloning software or Time Machine to keep a backup. You might like to download Data Rescue 3 demo and see if that recognizes anything on the failed drive. Commercial recovery will cost an arm and a leg, or maybe even more!


http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php

*facepalm*

I clearly don't know enough about SSDs, but as I've only very rarely heard of one failing I know even less about how to recover one. I would have thought that most HD-based recovery tools wouldn't be able to work with a failed SSD since it uses a wholly different approach to accessing file fragments.

I didn’t want to be negative yesterday, but I knew the "I Have no backups" was coming!